We’re delighted to announce the semifinalists for the Management 2.0 Challenge. In this first leg of the HBR/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation, we asked the most progressive thinkers and radical doers from every realm of endeavor to share a Story (a real-world case study of a single practice, an initiative, or a broad-based transformation) or a Hack (a disruptive idea, radical fix, or experimental design) that illustrates how the principles and tools of the Web can help to overcome the limits of conventional management and help to create Management 2.0.

For all of the fervor around innovation, far too many organizations are hostile places for new ideas (not to mention the people that harbor them). All too often, new ideas are cooked up in a hothouse environment—the executive inner sanctum, an invitation-only innovation offsite, a limited-access “war room”—and not shared widely until they’ve been sanctioned from on high. When they are offered up by some hardy soul in the trenches, they generally have just one place to go: up the chain of command. In other words, they get the hot lights of judgment before they get a chance to breathe.